


Don't Worry About Good Ol' Lance!

by wecara



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Bisexuality, Canon Universe, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Gordon Ramsay is there, Happy Ending, Lance (Voltron) Needs a Hug, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mom Friend Keith, Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt, takes place back when it was all simple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-08
Packaged: 2019-06-07 00:02:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15206408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wecara/pseuds/wecara
Summary: Lance has been feeling out of it for a while and no one knows why. He blames it on space sickness, dehydration, and a wealth of other random excuses, waving the crew’s concerned questions off with a smile and a goofy joke, even as he leaves to visit the infirmary for the upteenth time to pop a few tabs of Altean ibuprofen. Most of the crew knows that something is more off than it seems, but Lance won’t talk to them about it.Keith’s worried too, but he’s pretty sure it’s just homesickness—a feeling he doesn’t really have experience with—and doesn’t think much of it. That is, until the brunet shows up at his door in the middle of the night crying.





	Don't Worry About Good Ol' Lance!

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone, this is my first Klance fanfic because I have been sucked into the black hole that is Voltron Legendary Defender. I apologize to any of you who might be waiting for an update on my Drarry fanfic, but my mind is currently occupied elsewhere after season 6’s release!! I’ve been bawling my eyes out. Just a warning, Keith might seem a little OOC, but I have a little secret headcanon that while he doesn’t often show his emotions he is a good talker when the situation requires it, and that he has a secret Mom Mode that he got from Shiro. I’m sorry if this Keith doesn’t exactly fit everyone’s mental mold for him! I hope you still enjoy it.  
> Anyways, trigger warning for talk of mental health, specifically depression. Man do I love angst…  
> Thanks for reading! Comments big or small, hurtful or friendly, are all appreciated. I’d love feedback!

Shiro is first to notice that something is more off than it seems. To be a good leader, especially over Voltron, he has to understand and be able to predict every move his team makes in combat. He knows the ins and outs of every team member’s fighting styles, weaknesses, and favorite shots to take. Because of this he also knows that Lance is never knocked over that easily. Shiro would blame it on a bad day, but he should’ve gotten up by now.

“Lance, a little help here? You’re supposed to be ugh—!” Pidge jumps out of the way of a training bot’s sword before continuing, “covering me!” The smallest paladin takes their attention away from Lance to shoot their bayard’s grappling hook out and between the legs of two bots, yanking quickly and sweeping them off their feet, allowing Keith to jump in and slice them both into glowing dust with one clean motion. Lance’s head raises from the floor and he groans, pulling himself up with difficulty. 

“Sorry Pidge,” he says, but his voice is wobbly, a tone unlike him. He takes aim with his bayard, but  _ much  _ unlike the team sharpshooter, he misses a bot by miles, the beam very nearly singing Keith’s mullet clean off.

“Lance, what the fuck?!” Keith shouts, grunting and finishing off the bot Lance had been aiming for with a clumsy stab in the chest after being caught off guard by Lance’s blast. Shiro’s frown deepens as he observes this all from across the training deck, his hand glowing after finishing off his last robotic opponent.

“Sorry! I’m so sorry! I’m just—ugh—a little—Pidge! Watch out!—out of it,” Lance cries, narrowly avoiding being knocked over by a charging bot, not daring to bring his bayard up and risk hitting one of his teammates. 

“End training sequence,” Shiro commands, and the sparring bots go still before disintegrating into glowing dust. Hunk looks up from his bayard cannon’s scope, confusion dancing across his features as Shiro brushes past him and walks towards Lance, who is rubbing his head and wincing gently.

“Sorry, Shiro, I don’t know what’s happening, I should’ve hit that bot no problem,” Lance says, frustratedly biting on his lip. Shiro nods and puts a hand on the brunet’s shoulder comfortingly.

“It’s alright, how’re you feeling? I noticed you didn’t get up right away after being knocked down earlier,” he explains and Lance huffs bashfully.

“Yeah, I’m just a little lightheaded and dizzy. Probably dehydrated or something,” he hunches his shoulders ever so slightly, the defensive pose so subtle that only Hunk and Pidge notice, who glance at each other worriedly. They’ve known him long enough to know that he does this whenever he’s trying to brush something off. Whether it be to prevent his teammates from worrying after a fall during training or prove to Commander Iverson that _ I’m cool, let me back in, I wanna try again,  _ the pose is one frequently implemented. 

Shiro also senses bullshit, he’s seen dehydration before and he knows that for it to get this bad one needs to have been entirely without water for several days. Still, he decides to let it go with just a small frown. “Alright, go get some rest and water. I think that’s enough training for today, good work team.”

The group disbands, but Shiro’s mind is still nagging him with worry. 

 

Coran notices it second. A few vargas have passed since the team stopped training and he’s scanning the star map for a nearby space mall where he hopes to find a tool that Pidge requested be purchased ASAP, whatever that means. He hopes it isn’t an Earthly euphemism for more… sinister currency. Just then, the doors to the control room open and a pained, worn out looking Lance comes shuffling in. 

“Hey Coran,” he says, and even his usual chipper tone has dropped to a gravelly groan. The ginger haired Altean turns away from his task and nods at Lance in acknowledgement.

“Hello, number three, what brings you to the control room? Come to hear another one of my marvelous stories?” Coran asks excitedly, and it takes every last bit of energy Lance has left not to run screaming back to his dorm. While Coran’s adventures are indeed marvelous, Lance is  _ way  _ too tired to try to understand all of Coran’s alien slang terminology. 

“Unfortunately, no. I was just wondering where I might find some Altean Ibuprofen?” He asks uncertainly, rubbing his head unconsciously. Coran blinks, noting that the usually animated speaker appears unnaturally subdued.

“Sorry, Lance, but you’re gonna need to be a little more clear. Altean what?” He clarifies, stepping away from the starmap and over towards the exhausted looking teenager.

“Ibuprofen. You know, little pills about this big, you take one every few hours and it alleviates headaches, sore muscles, cramps, the works. Alteans have to have _something_ like it. You didn’t pop into the healing pods for simple muscle cramps ever, did you?” Lance finds it highly unlikely, but maybe Alteans were so advanced that their race just didn’t get headaches. You never know unless you ask. Coran’s face lights up with recognition.

“Ah, you must mean Kennefheiter! Yes, I believe we have some in the infirmary. I’ll go grab it,” the Altean says, already striding towards the door, but Lance catches his arm quickly.

“No! I mean… uh, it’s alright, I can get it myself. I don’t want to distract you from your work. Just tell me what the um, kenny-fighter?”

“Kennefhieter,” Coran substitutes.

“Right. What Kennefheiter looks like and I’ll find it. Don’t worry about me.” Lance tries to throw in a little wink for reassurance, but it has so little charisma to it that it only succeeds in making his face look like the nerves temporarily went out and made the left side of his face go slack. Coran glares dubiously at the Cuban and looks like he’s about to argue, but finally sighs and shrugs nonchalantly.

“Alright, whatever bolsters your demarium. It’s on a shelf somewhere in a big green bottle with a blue label and white Altean script. Can’t miss it. The pills are triangular and light green.” Lance smiles, relief flooding his features, before it drops like a rock, as if it took a heraculean amount of effort to do so. In this dilapidated state, it probably did.

“Thanks Coran, you’re the best.” Lance says and Coran smiles gently.

“You’re welcome. Oh, and don’t take more than one every seven-and-one-sixteenth vargas, or else your stomach could split in half!” Coran calls as Lance leaves. He gulps nervously.  _ Man  _ Alteans had weird shit going down on their planet. If the Galra hadn’t wiped them out they might’ve just destroyed themselves in time through unorthodox medical practices.

Coran watches the door close behind the blue paladin, his mind going a mile a minute. That insistence of getting the medication himself was odd, to say the least, especially considering the near panic that had covered his face. Either Lance really didn’t want Coran distracted from his duties or something more concerning is going on. He doesn’t think it’s the first option, as Lance has never been known to turn down an offer for help—unless he’s trying to prove himself or if it’s Keith offering—which leaves a wealth of possibilities for what it could be. 

He doesn’t think Lance would try to overdose, that’s far too outlandish of a theory. The only probable solution Coran can think of is that Lance had wanted to know exactly where to find the Kennefheiter for his own future indulgence, which indicates a greater, more chronic problem at hand than a simple one-time headache.

 

Pidge and Hunk are third ones to notice, simultaneously. They’d already known that  _ something  _ was amiss with their friend, what with his false excuse me of dehydration after a bafflingly poor performance in training. The pair was concerned, but trusted Lance to say something if things got harder than he could handle. Not that he ever  _ had  _ said anything to them, but it never seemed like there was reason to. He’s always been such a happy guy. 

“Hey, Hunk, take a look at this,” Pidge calls from the other side of the Green Lion’s hangar. They’re bent over a scan of their Lion’s internal mechanics in order to find a way to enhance the cloaking abilities it possesses. Hunk drops the tools he’d been inspecting in the box and rushes to the green paladin’s side

“Yeah, what’s up?” He asks. Pidge adjusts their glasses and points to a spiral of wires near the center of the scan. 

“Recognize this?” the shorter asks, and Hunk’s brown eyes narrow in concentration before widening with recognition. 

“Is that—?”

“The Fibonacci sequence? Inside our Lions? Yes, Hunk, my friend, it totally is,” Pidge finishes for him, too excited to wait for him to finish his sentence. Hunk gasps and leans in closer to the scan.

“Woah, this is amazing! Look, it’s over there, too!” 

“What’re you guys geeking out about?” Asks a tired voice from the other side of the hangar. Pidge looks up from the scan, their eyes glittering with enthusiasm, only to darken slightly with worry upon seeing Lance, rubbing his head and leaning wearily against the doorframe. Hunk’s nose is still buried in the holographic screen, prompting it with his fingers to show more of the internal hardware.

“The Fibonacci sequence, it’s in our Lions’ wiring, dude. And it’s everywhere—look! It’s even in the way the panels are bolted in! I’d never considered using it in engineering, it’s mostly a nature-based phenomenon, pinecones and flowers and whatnot, but maybe since Pidge’s Lion is the one connected to plants and—”

“We aren't  _ geeking out,  _ Lance. We’re studying our lions!” Pidge adds amidst the flurry of Hunk’s scientific drabble. He just continues spouting, and Lance tries not to tune it out immediately but it’s hard to keep up with.

“Holy shit,  _ Pidge,  _ remember those hexagonal basalt rock formations we learned about from that weird documentary last November? From Scotland? What if—woah, Lance, you’re looking…” Hunk’s rambling falls short as he looks up and catches a glimpse of the cuban boy’s face, which has paled from its usual rich, Cuban brownness. 

“Dashing? Handsome? Striking?” Lance fills in, tossing the Samoan some quick finger guns before detaching himself from the doorframe and stumbling over to the control panel next to his friends. He sits down quickly, his legs looking like they’re made of jelly. 

“I was going to say tired,” Hunk says, unease tingeing his voice. Lance shrugs and waves a hand dismissively.

“It’s fine, Coran gave me some medicine. I’ve just got a bit of a headache is all.” Pidge and Hunk do not look convinced. Lance smiles weakly, eager to change the subject. “What’re you guys working on? Besides making comparisons to rocks in Scotland.” At this, Pidge’s eyes light up once again and they start gesturing towards the panel in animated gestures. 

“The goal is to use a series of cameras and my Lion’s internal hardware to adapt the cloaked appearance so that it can mask motion in her surroundings. For example, if we were trying to do a stealth mission in a forest, the rustling and swaying of the leaves and branches around me would immediately give away my position. I want to try and counteract that, but I'm having trouble finding where in the Lion her shield technology originates. If I can harness the tech from the field that my Lion creates when protecting herself, I can easily alter the codes and install my upgrade.” 

“Yeah, the cloaking had been relatively easy compared to this because Pidge didn’t need to worry about anything that wasn't already there, y’know? The only goal was shrouding the Lion. Now, we need the equations from inside the Lions to cloak the space  _ around _ it at any given moment.” Hunk adds, and Lance blinks, barely retaining anything they’d said. Still, it sounded complicated, so he could sympathize with that.

“Yikes. Sounds like a big job, but if there’s anyone who can do it it’s you two,” he says genuinely, enjoying seeing the way their chests swell with pride. It makes him happy when his friends are happy. 

“Thanks Lance, but real talk, are you okay?” Hunk asks, and Lance wilts visibly. So it’s more obvious than he thought. He’s gonna have to work on his acting skills if he doesn’t want to slow down the team with all their pity and concern. 

“Yeah, Lance, what’s going on, for real?” Pidge asks, and Lance sighs.

“Like I said, just a little worn out. I think space sickness is finally catching up to me,” he says with a laugh that sounds dry and forced. Hunk’s brown eyes narrow.

“But, you don’t get space sick,” he says without a trace of doubt in his voice. Had Lance been even a little bit motion sick before, he sure was good at hiding it. Hunk didn’t know how he would ever survive a ride in the Blue Lion again, what with all of Lance’s barrel rolls and threading needles. He didn’t know that  _ anyone  _ prone to space sickness would. 

“Maybe it’s something I developed,” the Cuban says with a shrug. “Regardless, I’m sure I’ll get over it quickly. Space sickness doesn’t last long, so don’t worry!” Man, Lance is getting tired of saying  _ don’t worry.  _

“Look, I don’t usually trust your judgement on, well, anything, but I do for this instance. I know you know your own limits. Just promise us that if any of this gets too hard for you to handle yourself you’ll come tell us, okay?” Pidge says with Hunk nodding enthusiastically behind them. Lance feels his heart soften considerably. 

“I will, I promise. If anything happens that I can’t deal with by myself you two will be the first to know.” His friends’ faces brighten at this, and then fall into an easy chatter as Lance observes them work. Here in the Green Lion’s hangar, exchanging jokes with his oldest friends aboard the castle of Lions while they nerd out about mathematical patterns and the wonders of Voltron’s engineering, Lance feels better than he has all day. 

 

No one else notices for a while. In fact, it’s almost a week before the fourth, Allura, even considers that Lance might be less okay than he’s letting on. The team has just returned from a relatively easy Galra destroying mission after running into a handful of small fighter ships while coasting through the outer reaches of the Galra empire, and Lance looks  _ wiped out.  _

He immediately drops into his chair in the control room, tossing his helmet aside carelessly and tilting his head back into the unforgiving metal backrest. The rest of the paladins, while looking a little worn for wear, easily split off to conduct their own personal business shortly after a quick briefing with the princess. 

Allura pays Lance no mind as he remains still in his chair, continuing her business with Coran plotting an attack on a Galran supply route. Before long, the dobashes stretch into vargas and the pair of Alteans decide to break for the day, with Coran retiring for an early bedtime and Allura claiming that she wants to work for a few more minutes before following his example.

She hums happily, tapping at the holographic screen amicably. She wonders where the mice might be, she could use some company now that Coran is gone. It’s been a while since they’ve talked, and she misses their squeaky company. 

Allura throws a handful of her silver hair behind her shoulder as she frowns at the screen. The supply route is heavily guarded, as most are nowadays after Voltron emerged and started proving itself a threat. If she wants to find a weakness in their armor she’s gonna need to scan every inch of the checkpoint bases along the routes, and even scour through some of the empty space between them just in case. If this plan is going to work it has to be absolutely perfect with no room for error. 

She’s completely forgotten about Lance, absorbed with her work for another few dobashes before startled out of focus by a muttering noise from behind her.

“Don’t worry,” Lance mumbles, causing Allura to whirl around in alarm. Her eyes dart around the room before zeroing in on the Cuban boy still draped across the chair he’d thrown himself into vargas ago. His limbs are tossed haphazardly across the chair, and it doesn’t look comfortable.

“Lance?! You’re still here?” She cries, surprised that he hasn’t uttered a word since returning from the mission ages ago. Extremely unusual for the blue paladin. He remains still, and his head is turned away from her. “Lance?” she asks again after he neglects to respond. She can see his legs twitching ever-so-slightly and she’s wondering with frustration why he’s ignoring her when he shifts his head and it lolls forward, allowing her to view his face. His eyes are closed and his eyebrows are drawn in distress. His mouth is moving soundlessly, and Allura realizes immediately with a coolness permeating her gut the reason for his unusual behavior. 

Nightmare. 

“Lance,” she breathes, skipping off the raised circular panel of the main control hub and towards the boy, who looks as if his condition is worsening with every tick. His fingers and legs are twitching erratically, his breathing shallow and his eyes moving restlessly underneath his eyelids. He looks to be in pain. 

“Lance, wake up,” she orders gently, placing her hand tenderly on his cheek. Her heart pangs with worry as the blue paladin’s look of fear deepens. His head jerks back from her touch suddenly, hitting the backrest of his chair with a  _ crack.  _ Allura snatches her hand back as if it has been burned. 

“Lance! Are you alright?!” she cries as his blue eyes flutter open, a tortured gasp erupting from his lips. His tanned face is sheened with sweat and he gulps in air as if he’s been trapped underground for vargas. After the initial panic subsides, he quirks his head to the side in sleepy confusion.

“A-Allura?” he says weakly. “What’re… where…?” his thoughts are lost moments after they tumble from his tongue as he wearily takes in his surroundings. 

“You fell asleep and were having a nightmare,” the Altean princess responds easily to his unfinished questions. “I was trying to wake you up gently but you were very… lost.” Lance’s confused face hardens into a tight-lipped frown. 

“Boy, do I know it. Sorry, Allura.” He sighs deeply as if he’s apologizing some unforgivable mistake, and Allura shakes her head with a soft smile. 

“Don’t be sorry, you only fell asleep. You can’t help your dreams,” she says comfortingly, extending her hand once again to place it on his shoulder in an act of emotional support. Lance blushes very slightly and returns her smile, and they’re quiet for a few precious moments before Allura frowns thoughtfully. “I do wonder why you fell asleep here in the first place. You didn’t speak a word throughout the entire briefing and even after that. Are you feeling alright?”

Lance sighs again as if he’s mentally kicking himself. For what, Allura doesn’t have the faintest clue. “Yeah, I’ve just been having trouble sleeping lately and it’s making me more prone to uh,” he gestures vaguely, “random catnaps.”

“I see,” Allura says. “Is it because you frequently nightmares similar to this last one?”  _ damn.  _ Curse Allura and her oddly perceptive ways. She always seems to know exactly what’s up. Because of this, Lance can’t find any way to bullshit this logically and finally succumbs to tell her the truth.

“Yeah, but please don’t tell anyone else.” Allura is taken aback by the statement.

“Why ever not? I’m sure if we all helped to come up with a solution—”

“No, please. I don’t want you guys to worry. I already know what’s going on, so I know that all it needs is the all-healing salve of time.” Lance’s face looks pleading, almost desperate, and once again the white-haired woman is perplexed by his vague-sounding answer. 

“Are you sure? You know you can talk to us, right? About anything?” The hand resting on the paladin’s shoulder gives a brief but comforting squeeze, to which Lance responds with an understanding smile. 

“Yeah, I do. Just trust me, okay? All I need is some time for my head to sort itself out.” 

“Your head? Are you homesick? Is that what this is all about?” Keith hears Allura’s soft and tender voice as he wanders past the control room doorway on his way to his room. He’s surprised anyone is still awake, he’d thought that everyone else had been asleep long before he’d gone into the training deck for a little practice. He likes training, and while he relishes the way his adrenaline goes up while fighting the bots, he almost craves the feeling of the resulting energy low. It makes it exponentially easier for him to get to sleep. 

Curious, he pauses and presses his ear against the door. He knows he shouldn’t be eavesdropping, but he’s never heard Allura sounding quite so perplexed while still maintaining an air of comfort. Besides, what is so important that she’s up talking about it at this hour? He hears a quiet chuckle that sounds unfamiliar. He’s pretty sure he knows every crew member’s laugh well enough, and that one is alarmingly foreign.

“Yeah, something like that.” Wait. No, it couldn't be. The voice had been low and tinged with exhaustion, sadness, and something like resignation. It had also carried a faint resemblance to the easygoing, clownish Cuban Lance McClain. The tone of his voice had been so completely unlike him that Keith almost was prepared to go charging in, bayard swinging, ready for an attack on an unknown alien. 

“I think I understand, Lance. And I know how terrible it feels to miss them,” well that answers that. The person Allura is talking to in the middle of the night is, in fact, the blue paladin sharpshooter. Keith sighs and lifts himself away from the door, having heard enough. He’s not an idiot, he knows that Lance has been a little… off lately, but now that he knows it’s just homesickness he doesn’t feel he needs to worry about it anymore. He doesn’t have any experience with that feeling, all he’d had was a shack in the desert while on Earth. The only person he would ever be homesick for is maybe Shiro, but he’s aboard the Castle of Lions with them. Keith couldn’t be of any help to Lance even if he wanted to. 

That fact hurts just a little bit. As Keith returns to his room he allows himself a long, hot shower in order to stew on his thoughts. He cares about Lance, even thinking of him and the other paladins as family. He wants to be able to comfort them whenever they’re down, but this is obviously beyond his realm of capabilities. He’s never been great with people, keeping to himself had been his entire life back on Earth. Keith’s attempts at comforting Lance might do more damage than repair. 

But he really  _ wants  _ to. He wants to be the one to make Lance smile, wants to say just the right thing to bring his frown to a blinding grin. He wants to be someone the blue paladin can confide in with all his troubles, sitting on the observation deck and staring at the stars while they just talk about life and it’s complexities, enjoying each other’s company. He wants to wrap his arms around the taller boy’s shoulders and hold him tight, relishing in his warmth. 

No,  _ no,  _ he can’t afford to be thinking like that. He leans his forehead against the cool tile of the shower wall with a heavy sigh. He’s made the mistake of letting his thoughts wander this way several times before, and it’s always ended poorly for him, the disappointment that it’ll never be a reality threatening to crush him. 

Crush. How fitting. 

Keith gets dressed in a tee shirt and his boxers and forces himself to go to sleep, pointedly  _ not  _ thinking about how nice it might feel to bury his nose into the crook of Lance’s neck. 

 

Days later, Lance is sitting in his Lion, idly wandering through space with the other paladins on the way to a peaceful planet not yet occupied by the Galra. It had been a miraculous find on Allura’s part, the planet is rich with resources that could be of vast assistance to them and their fight against the evil empire, and the people appear willing to join the coalition of other liberated planets. This could be a huge step forward in the fight, and Lance is positively buzzing with anticipation. 

“Think there’ll be any cute alien chicks on this planet?” he asks through the intercom, and he can almost  _ feel  _ Keith’s eye roll. His team members’ resounding groans cause him to giggle excitedly. The adrenaline of a new, game-changing mission is making him giddy.

Suddenly a loud crash echoes through space and Lance grunts as his Lion lurches forward. 

“What was that?!” Hunk calls through the intercom, and Lance checks his sensors in alarm.

His blood runs cold.

“The Galra…” He gasps, but it’s more than that. The sensors are positively  _ crowded _ by red dots, each one indicating a different Galra ship behind them, a sea of endless red stretching out for miles. 

“How the fuck…?” Pidge’s voice is laced with horror, and Shiro doesn’t even correct her language. There’s no use fleeing, the Galra ships are closing around them as they fly as easily as a snake swallowing its prey whole. Shiro, seeing nowhere else to go, orders the paladins turn their lions and come face-to-face with their Galran enemies. The sky is so pregnant with the ships’ greyish metal and ominous purple glow that it’s difficult—impossible even—to make out any stars.

“Form Vol—” Shiro’s command is cut off by a blinding display of purple streaks, a thousand ion cannons going off at once. The space around them is filled, like threads in a loom they whirl past in indistinguishable frequency. Lance shouts and pulls his Lion back just in time to dodge one, but is immediately grazed by another, and another, and another. The friendly blue glow inside the cockpit dims, then fades out entirely. He feels his Lion’s presence withdraw.

“Wait, what? Come on, old girl!” Lance pulls desperately at the controls, presses a few buttons, even tries kissing the dashboard, but the light does not return, and neither does Blue. “Guys, I’ve been hit too much! My Lion’s without power!” He cries into the crackling intercom, which is full of his teammate’s shouts and screams. Heart racing, he leaps from his seat and peers through the Lion’s glass eye just in time to see Hunk get hit directly in the side. The bulky Samoan grunts as the ship goes careening through space, out of Lance’s direct line of sight.

“Hunk!” He shouts, but it’s drowned out by the others calling out for backup or desperate updates on their hopeless statuses. Lance whirls around and punches desperately at his controls once more, knowing that they won’t do anything. He’s entirely helpless. He groans in frustration, hitting his helmet with his fists in concentration.

“Come on Lance, think, how’re we gonna get out of this?” A loud crashing sound fills his ears, and it takes Lance a moment to realize that it isn’t coming from Blue, but his intercom. 

One of his friends has been hit. Badly.

“Guys?! Is everyone—” his sentence ends in a strangled cry as he sees the Red Lion, unresponsive with glass pouring from her eyes, hovering in space. Keith’s prone form floats unmoving past her jaw, apparently ejected from the cockpit through her broken eyes. 

“ _ Keith! _ ” Lance screams, but the red paladin does not respond. He escapes manually from Blue’s jaw, jetpacking desperately towards the vulnerable form of his friend, shouting hysterically through the intercom all the way.

He’s just a few meters away, his arms outstretched, ready to catch him, and drag the boy back to the safety of Blue, when a sickening purple glow flickers in the corner of his eye. 

Everything moves in slow motion as Lance watches an ion cannon’s beam jet towards them, but he knows it isn’t going to hit him. They’re aiming for Keith. A heart wrenching half sob half scream tears past his lips as Lance sees Keith’s unconscious face overtaken by a blinding purple light. 

No sooner than it started does the light fade out, and Keith is nowhere in sight, completely disintegrated into dust particles smaller than the pinpricks of the stars. Tears fall down Lance’s face as he lets out a silent scream. 

 

Lance’s eyes flutter open and he lets out a tortured gasp. His eyes are wet and his throat feels sore. Keith is dead. 

“I’m sorry,” he sobs into the cold emptiness of his room. “I’m so, so sorry.” 

He stumbles down to Keith’s old room where Lance had often found himself returning after the funeral, if only to be around his smell, the things he’d touched. Without even a body to bury, it sometimes felt like Keith had never existed. Lance needed something tangible that he could hug or smell or see in order to get that idea out of his head. 

 

Keith had just finished showering but is restless in bed and debating going back to the training deck when his door opens to the sound of heartbreaking sobs. He sits bolt upright in his bed, rushing to his feet to see the crumpled face of Lance, hiccuping and gasping words Keith can’t quite make out. It’s been a couple weeks since he’d eavesdropped on his and Allura’s conversation, but Lance has seemed better since then. 

Obviously this assumption is false.

Lance looks so broken that Keith lets out a small involuntary gasp of alarm. His shoulders are hunched and his elbows are tucked into his body as his hands work to wipe away the endless stream of tears careening down his brown, freckled cheeks. His nose wrinkles with every gasp that falls from his lips, and while his posture betrays an obviously heartbroken sort of emotion, his eyes are the hardest to look at.

The blue pools are surrounded by red, glistening with tears and a sadness so full and deep that Keith feels a sudden urgent need to go check on the rest of the ship and make sure he didn’t just witness the other team members’ deaths or something equally as upsetting. The look he gives Keith carries enough grief to make him, a far from empathetic person, want to join Lance in his sobbing. The boy is absolutely decimated. 

“Lance?” Keith asks quietly, his voice barely above a whisper. Lance’s breaths come out in jagged sobs as he responds.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” his cries escalate in volume and he weakly reaches up to touch the boy’s black hair. All Keith can do is stare as Lance’s shoulders shake pathetically. His trembling fingers card through his hair, but it looks like the effort of just this movement is draining him. 

_ “Ke-ei-eith, _ ” Lance stutters through gasps and hiccups, and Keith feels his heart stop before jolting back to life with alarming speed to make up for the pause. 

He sounds so  _ sad.  _ Distraught, even. And still his fingers carve shaky streams through his raven locks, still Keith stands awkwardly with his fists clenched at his sides. There was nothing _ ever _ that could have prepared him for this. 

Finally he gathers his thoughts well enough to snap out of his stupor. He lifts a hesitant hand to where Lance is brokenly toying with the hair at the nape of his neck, covering the Cuban boy’s slightly larger hand with his own and pressing it against his face, Lance’s pinky finger resting perfectly underneath his jaw. Lance’s fingers stop their ministrations but they still tremble underneath Keith’s, he can feel every tiny tremor as it is absorbed by his cheek.

“What happened?” he asks gently. Keith wants nothing more than to soothe the boy’s distraught sobs until he’s back to his old smiling self, but first he has to make sure everything is alright outside. Judging by Lance’s reaction something terrible could’ve happened in the short time between getting back from the training deck and Lance arriving at his door. 

“You d-died,” Lance says, and it feels like all of Keith’s insides fall to the floor. 

“I what? Lance, I didn’t—”

“Y-you were h-h-hit by an ion c-cannon in spa-a-ace, I couldn’t s-s-save you,” Lance’s cries grow more hysterical and he leans over suddenly, burying his wet face in the shoulder of Keith’s tee shirt. Keith grows, if anything, more perplexed, but nevertheless wraps his arms around Lance’s—surprisingly muscled—torso in an awkward hug. He  _ died?  _ It didn’t make sense, why would Lance think—

_ Oh.  _

“Lance, shh, it’s okay, it was just a dream,” Keith’s an idiot. He’d known that Lance was having trouble sleeping, everyone had. His eyes have constant dark bags and he yawns practically every sentence these days. It only makes sense that it’s because of nightmares. Strange and realistic nightmares that are apparently difficult to set apart from reality.

“Shh, shh, shh,” he soothes over and over again, just like his own dad used to whenever he woke up from a nightmare. Any awkwardness or shock over the situation has dissolved, and Lance is now at the receiving end of Keith’s rare but genuine Comfort Mode. He rubs Lance’s back and massages the nape of his neck with both hands, murmuring “it’s just a dream, it’s alright, I’m here,” as if it’s a mantra. He sways back and forth on his feet, rocking Lance like he’s a baby. A very large, grief-stricken baby. 

After several dobashes, Lance’s trembling has decreased significantly, and his choking sobs are little more than the occasional stuttering gasp. Keith reluctantly detangles himself from the blue paladin’s arms to take a look at his face. He can’t see very well in the dim bluish glow of the bedrooms, but is relieved to see that the previous sadness crumpling Lance’s face like tissue paper has been replaced by a softly forlorn expression. He meets Keith’s grey-violet eyes and holds his gaze for a couple moments before it drops to the floor. He almost looks guilty.

“Sorry about that,” he mutters, and Keith realizes with a jolt that he still has his hands on Lance’s shoulders. He debates dropping them for a moment but decides to leave them, rubbing small circles on the taller boy’s arms with his thumbs. Keith makes a clicking noise with his tongue and shakes his head.

“Don’t be sorry, Lance.  _ I’m  _ sorry that you had to go through that,” he responds, to which Lance shakes his head with a self-loathing chuckle. 

“It just felt so  _ real,  _ Keith, you died right in front of me. There was a funeral and everything, I don’t—” he chokes on the last few words, his throat feeling tight as new, unshed tears attempt to well up in his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sad in my entire life.”

Keith’s hand slides down Lance’s arm to tangle in his slender brown fingers, dragging him by the hand to sit on the edge of his bed. Lance still refuses to meet his eyes as he sits down in a heap, exhaustion overtaking the acute sadness in his features. Keith’s hand stays intertwined with Lance’s, but the Cuban doesn’t make any move to pull away. If anything, he leans slightly into the touch, their shoulders close—close enough that Keith can feel the other boy’s body heat through his tee shirt—but not quite touching. Keith usually shies away from this kind of physical contact, he wants to brush it off as just being there for the taller boy, but for some reason Lance feels  _ comforting.  _ He doesn’t want to let go just yet. 

“Why do you think it was so… vivid? I mean, I’ve been noticing that you haven’t been sleeping well lately so I can only assume…” Keith trails off and shrugs in a way that shows anything but the nonchalance he had been going for, trying his best to sate his curiosity while simultaneously being mindful of not rushing the topic before Lance is ready to talk about it. If Keith wants to be a good teammate and paladin, he needs to be able to talk to his friends in all sorts of ways, which means he has to be capable of breaching sensitive topics with people besides Shiro. He’s never tried to have anything even remotely resembling a heart-to-heart with anyone else. Maybe it’s time he learns how. Lance sighs a deep, shuddering sigh. 

Lance really doesn’t want to go into it. He  _ hates  _ talking deep, especially considering  _ this.  _ His favorite role has always been the listener. He prides himself on being the secret-keeper in every environment he’s been. At his home he was the one who would sit on a stool while his Mamá griped in Spanish about his Papá’s stubbornness or how dirty the house was just as rapidly as she chopped the vegetables for dinner each night. He was the one who his brother Julio came to whenever he was having troubles with other boys at school. At the Garrison, he made even the newest of strangers feel confident enough to spill all their deep, dark inner struggles on him after just one class of being tablemates. Here on the Castle of Lions he liked to sit in Hunk’s room with Pidge and sometimes Allura, his pillow wrapped in his arms and leaning against the wall while he braided Allura’s hair, and hear them all gossip about Coran’s hidden muscles or reminisce of all the things they missed from their home planets. He’s always been the listener, never the speaker for very explicit reasons.

He knows that the only thing that’ll come out of him spilling his problems is his friends worry and resulting empathetic sadness. He’s seen how they react after someone so much as stubs their toe, the paladins are an emotion-sharing group. If one cries, everyone cries. If one laughs, everyone laughs. Why the fuck would he want to have his friends share the same pain he endures on a daily basis? Lance has felt how horrible it is, and he would be some sort of shitty friend to unload all that on them, like  _ “Hey, wanna feel what it’s like to be fucking depressed all the time and want to die? Here ya go!”  _

No, he’d much rather suffer in silence, because at least then he knows the pain is his  _ own  _ burden to carry. It’s quarantined, it can’t hurt anyone else. But now that he’s gone and sobbed into Keith’s shoulder like a little kid about something that didn’t happen, entirely convinced that it did because of his stupid, fucked up mind, he feels like he owes it to the red paladin. This isn’t one of those times where he can just blame it on homesickness or dehydration and wave them off with a (unconvincing) smile and a quick  _ “don’t worry!”  _ Keith will definitely call bullshit, or maybe he’ll just leave Lance be until he conducts a crew-wide meeting (excluding Lance) about an intervention. 

Oh, that would be absolutely disastrous. If Keith went off blabbering about Lance’s weird nightmares, the crew would go berzerk. They aren't stupid in the slightest, at least one if not all of them would put two and two together and realize that he’s been losing sleep because of it for a while, and then they’d confront him about it, and he’d have to tell them about the antidepressants and then how long he’s been taking them for and then how long he’d been living without them before he even knew what depression was and  _ oh fuck,  _ he can’t let that happen. It would be a total shitstorm. No, it’s safer if he just confides in this one person just once. Maybe he can convince Keith that he has it under control and then he won’t tell anyone?

Besides, it might be nice to get some of this shit off his chest for once. He remembers spending countless sleepless nights on the roof of his little childhood home, staring at the stars peeking out from the humid clouds and listening all night to his older sister Veronica joke about all her high school troubles with mean girls and pink skirts and her cute TA, crying and laughing and making pinky promises. He wants that again, and maybe he can get it in the prickly personality of the red paladin. Lance wasn’t sure before, but he’s positive now that Keith, just underneath the steely, brooding surface, is a mushy softie with a big heart.

“Yeah, you’d assume correctly. I’m having super vivid, realistic dreams because of some withdrawal symptoms.” There, he said it. It’s out in the open for Keith to latch onto, incorporate it into his heart, and do with it what he will. Lance’s feelings are officially un-quarantined. Keith’s dark eyebrows furrow, and Lance realizes with a not entirely unwelcome warmness spreading through his stomach that Keith is actually… really pretty when he isn’t all angry and shouting or moody and pouty.

“Withdrawal symptoms as in, like,  _ drugs?”  _ the boy sounds so scandalized that Lance can’t help but let out a sharp, barking laugh. It feels odd in his throat, and the melancholy realization that  _ oh, I haven’t really laughed in a long time,  _ settles over him like an icy rain. 

“Yeah, drugs. But not in the way you’re probably thinking. I’ve got this sexy little medication called Venlafaxine keeping me buzzed.” Keith’s head tilts endearingly. Oh, fuck, Lance is way too attracted to him right now for it to be healthy. Is this supposed to happen when you finally start to open up? An inexplicable fondness? How can such feelings happen in such a quick amount of time? 

_ Maybe they’ve been there all along,  _ a tiny voice echoes in his head, to which he pointedly responds,  _ shut the fuck up.  _

“Venlafaxine?” Keith repeats, and Lance nods.

“Yeah, it’s an antidepressant. It also helps a little with my ADHD. I had a bottle in my coat pocket from when I picked my refill up from the Garrison’s pharmacy and forgot to take it out before I went to bed, thank god for that. Without it I would’ve had to start going through all this right at the beginning of our whole Voltron adventure,” Lance lets out a snort, “I probably would’ve given up right away if I wasn’t still on my bullshit.” 

“Wait, wait, antidepressant? Does that mean you’re…” 

“Depressed? Yes. In desperate need of my therapist? Yes. Really fucking sad most of the time? Sort of, it’s mostly numb nowadays. About to get worse because I’m out of my happy pills? Abso-fucking-lutely.” His response is dry and humorless, even though he coughs up a fake chuckle near the end. He’s never said any of this to anyone except his psychologist, refusing to go into it with even his family. He’d always come back from the office grinning (even if it’s been mere moments since he was sobbing into the therapist’s scratchy throw pillows), saying that the visits were just to make sure everything was still going okay, that it’s nothing serious, just a routine checkup,  _ no really, Luis, I’m fine.  _

Oh, great. Now he’s worrying about the delivery. He should’ve thought it all through before he just dumped all this on Keith. Maybe write a script? He’ll keep that in mind for next time. Index cards are your friend. Well, they will be if he  _ does  _ ever do this again. He’s starting to remember all the reasons he’d avoided talking about his feelings in the first place, and is now sincerely regretting his choice. Lance really wants to see Keith’s face right now, but he doesn’t want to look at it. His Mamá had always bragged that she had eyes on the back of her head. What Lance wouldn’t do to have inherited that trait in this moment. 

Finally he manages to tear his eyes away from his hands, clasped and jiggling over his bouncing leg, and looks up to see Keith’s face inches from his. As if the proximity isn’t enough to make him blush, the look on the red paladin’s face is pure openness, and once again Lance is reminded of how fucking  _ gorgeous  _ he didn’t know Keith could be. His eyes are large and directed immediately at him, an unreadable emotion flitting across them in sparkly waves. His mouth is parted slightly as he chews on the right corner of his bottom lip, which is  _ unbelievably  _ hot, and a couple strands of his hair falls lazily across his forehead in messy, sleepy arcs. Lance suddenly wants to end this conversation,  _ right now,  _ in favor of pinning the boy to his bed and ravaging those pink, pouty lips into oblivion. Fuck feelings, fuck meds, fuck withdrawals. All that other stuff pales in importance in Lance’s life compared to the desire to nip at all of Keith’s most sensitive places until he’s putty in his hands. 

_ Woah, bucko, calm down,  _ Lance says desperately to himself as his brain short-circuits. He vaguely remembers from the first visit to the psychiatrist’s office, picking up his first bottle of what would be a new step in his daily routine for the next three years, the long-winded speil of all possible withdrawal symptoms should the medicine not work and he’d be forced to switch to something stronger. Unwanted feelings had been one of them, he thinks, which could explain this weird… lust… that he’s  _ mostly  _ sure wasn’t ever there before. 

He thinks  _ mostly  _ because of the annoying memory of when he’d seen Keith in the training deck late at night, his paladin armor gone and replaced by baggy grey sweats and a tight-fitting white tank top. Lance knows a snack when he sees one, and Keith had looked absolutely  _ delectable  _ that night. But besides that he’s pretty sure he never felt this way before. Of course not! Keith is his rival! Not his love interest!

“That sucks,” Keith says, and Lance blinks in surprise. Oh, right, antidepressants. Lance opens his mouth to begin his response, the usual one that comes after the initial “I’m sorry” in most situations, when he recalls what the raven haired boy said. It wasn’t “I’m sorry,” no, it had been something different. In just two words, the raven haired boy has eradicated every pre-prepared response Lance owned, wiping his repertoire free like a mother wipes her child’s cheek free of tears. 

_ That sucks.  _ What a perfect reply. No false promises of help, no awkward words of pity spat clumsily from the lips like a cough, no. It was simply sympathy. A recognition that yes, Lance is going through hell, and yes, he understands that it is hell and no amount of words will transform it into something better. Lance is gonna file that away for future use. 

“Is that why you’ve been acting so weird these past couple of weeks?” 

“Yeah. The vivid dreams, dizziness, agitation, occasional panic attacks, they’re all symptoms of antidepressant withdrawal. I just need to ride it out until it goes away, but that could take months, especially since I just stopped taking them really abruptly rather than weaning myself and decreasing my doses because I’m an idiot.” Lance rakes his hand through his hair in frustration, making it stick up in cute sprigs of brown. Keith notices for the first time that Lance’s hair has a little curl to it, and the realization is like sun on a rainy day, splitting the darkened clouds and making every surface—wet and cool and crisp from the storm—sparkle in a dazzling display of blinding color, too beautiful yet too simple all at once.

“You’re not an idiot, you’re just in a tough situation,” Keith reassures, giving his fingers a little squeeze. Lance snorts.

“You really think that?” he asks, his tone dripping with sarcasm. Keith frowns, a sideways sort of half pout that reminds Lance of creased parchment, the corners not quite lined up, but close enough to pass as well done. Keith grabs Lance’s other hand so that he’s forced to turn and look at him. 

“Yeah, Lance, I do. Mental health is a heartless bitch and it does things that totally suck and you don’t deserve it. What you  _ do  _ deserve is a good support system with people who love you and want to help you kick depression’s ass,” Keith says vehemently, his blood coursing through him like molten silver cascading through the furnace fires; hot, glowing, and spewing from it the energy of a thousand previous emotions attached before they were melted down, their forms nothing more than a fiery cream. He  _ needs  _ Lance to understand him, like a fish needs water or a bird needs air. 

Lance’s face is slightly pinched and uncomfortable, and Keith notices quickly that his grip on the taller boy’s wrists has grown vicelike in nature, pressing into sinewy smoothness as if his fingerprints want to leave marks. He loosens his grip but doesn’t fully let go before continuing.

“So why didn’t you bother to tell any of us until now? Everyone’s noticed that  _ something  _ is up, Lance, you must’ve known that you can’t just hide away forever. I’m confused as to why you decided to put off the inevitable.” 

“Becaaause,” Lance groans, “everyone is just too damn empathetic! Especially Hunk and Pidge.”

“And this is a bad thing…?” Keith asks, tilting his head. He might not understand other people very well, but he hopes he isn’t so oblivious to his friends’ emotions that he never noticed when empathy became a troubling trait. Lance nods enthusiastically.

“ _ Yes,  _ Keith! I know from experience that they’re the type of people to take your pain and make it their own. I don’t—” he ruffles his hair with his fingers again, a habit Keith is beginning to recognize as a frustrated tick—“I don’t want other people to feel this way. Like, if I know that it sucks ass, why would I want my friends to also go through that? It’s stupid and selfish and literally the worst thing I could imagine doing. I know how bad it is. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, let alone my friends.” Once Lance is finished his head feels lighter but his heart feels like steel. Keith is looking at him with the  _ exact  _ expression Lance has been trying to keep off of his friends’ faces since day one. The realization that he’s failed his only objective is like fingers breaking through the first hardened layer of stagnant snow, the ice falling away from the fleshy intruders before digging into fluffy, untouched powder.

He looks like he’s in pain.

Physical pain.

_ Lance’s  _ pain. 

Finally, after what feels like a decade of silence and awkward prolonged eye contact, Keith slowly untangles his hands from Lance’s, and there’s a moment where he misses the touch and wonders what he has to do to get it back before Keith’s hands, slow as a turtle, rise up to Lance’s cheeks. The movement is torturous to his broken heart, already prolonging his pain, Keith desires to prolong whatever strange point he’s going to make. His palms frame the blue paladin’s tanned face firmly, and for a fleeting moment Lance’s heartbeat quickens and he wonders if  _ Oh god, this is it, Keith is going to kiss me,  _ before he opens his mouth and speaks.

“What are you?” the red paladin asks, but it sounds more like a command than an inquiry. He’s searching for something, a pre-made answer that comes wrapped up in a neon box, fresh off the supermarket shelves. Lance blinks a few times in confusion before Keith repeats himself, firmer this time, adding a little shake to Lance’s head for emphasis. “What. are. you?”

“An… idiot sandwich?” Lance finishes, praying to god that Keith wasn’t actually trying to have some sort of moment entirely removed from the quote from god himself, Gordon Ramsay. Keith nods sternly, and Lance lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. 

“That’s right. An idiot sandwich. Because by your logic, sharing the pain sooner rather than later means less pain for everyone.” Lance frowns, and Keith pointedly does  _ not  _ become entranced by the way his lower lip juts out, looking pouty but incredibly soft.

“You’re gonna have to elaborate a little bit more here, Keith,” Lance replies, to which Keith drops his hands from Lance’s face in order to use them in his explanation.

“Okay, Lance, if what you’re saying is true, and everyone’s empathy levels will make it so they feel the same pains you do upon telling them about it, even if you know that telling them might make you feel better after some friendly support, then here’s what I’m thinking.” Keith holds one hand up a few inches higher than the other, which is flat against his lap. “Upon the first bit of pain you experience, you’re looking somewhat like this,” Keith wiggles the fingers on the hand that’s a few inches over his thigh, “and the rest of us are down here,” he motions using the other hand that’s resting on his lap. “So if you tell us, we’ll go up to where you are, correct?”

Lance nods, suddenly feeling extremely wary of how this conversation is going. He’s not used to Keith acting this… mathematical.

“ _ But,”  _ the raven haired boy says, leaning closer for emphasis, and Lance can feel the tension welling up through the gesture like drops into the sea behind a breaking dam, “if you just keep it bottled up inside, all by yourself, without anyone to talk to about it, your levels go up.” Keith lifts the hand indicating Lance up slowly but surely as he speaks, until it’s about shoulder height. “And since none of us are completely oblivious, someone is bound to notice and call you out on it or even just find out on our own. And when we do, everyone else will skyrocket—” the hand dubbed ‘everyone else’ suddenly shoots up, level with the shoulder height ‘Lance’ “—and we’ll all be in a thousand times more shit than if you’d just told us right away when you were still down here,” He lowers the hands back to their original positions before dropping them onto his lap, the demonstration completed. 

Fuck, he’s right, and it pisses Lance off how it makes so much sense. He’s been torturing himself about this for weeks, running his logic through his head over and over, reassuring himself that  _ staying silent is the right thing to do, staying silent is the right thing to do.  _ Yet here comes Keith in one stupid little puppet show, breaking down his every last moral rule like a giant, messy Jenga tower. Lance starts to realize that maybe his impenetrable quarantine wall he’d built around himself was, in reality, no more than wooden ABC blocks, fortified by his traitorous childlike imagination. He truly is, without a doubt, the universe’s biggest idiot sandwich.

Lance groans emphatically, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes until they ache, kaleidoscopes of swirly black patterns overtaking his vision. Keith watches this, like one might view a dying animal through a nature documentary camera lens. Knowing that it has to happen, but wanting it to stop. He stays like this for a few bated breaths, a detached onlooker of Lance’s internal torture, before removing the taller boy’s hands from his face. He’s relieved to be touching him again, like a tangle of yarn pulling his fingers together, constricting the harder he tries to escape, Lance’s touch becomes the single tug on the end of the thread that makes the knots undone. Then a hot flash of irritation sweeps through him that he’s letting himself be carried away so fully by the wave that is the blue paladin. 

“So do you see now why it’s better to tell people sooner rather than later?” he asks carefully. Keith isn’t going to lie, he’d been shellshocked when Lance first told him about what had really been bothering him. Like dry ice slipping past his lips and down his throat into his stomach, the news spread papery frost feathers everywhere it touched, chilling him to his core. He’d never felt so horrified. Now he understood the phrase “chilled to the bone.” 

It isn’t homesickness or dehydration or space sickness, but something much worse. It’s something that has been eating him from the inside out for who knows how long, a horrible black serpent glowing eyes and venomous fangs writhing inside his blood. It’s a beast Lance has been fighting alone, with pills to sedate it and acting to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s a burden no boy his age should have to deal with, especially on a ship careening through space. It’s something Keith doesn’t know how to kill, which frustrates him to no end. 

“Yeah, I—I get it. I’m just so fucking done with this mental health shit.” Lance hisses bitterly, causing Keith’s heart to tighten painfully. “Like, Keith, you have no  _ idea  _ how fucking  _ raw  _ you feel every day, waking up, knowing that everyone around you is doing the same things as you, eating the same meals, talking to the same people, touching the same walls, living the same life, but they actually  _ feel things.  _ Like  _ real emotions.  _ I don’t have that. I just have echoes of sensations I used to know but don’t recognize. I’ll feel like, the buzz of happiness or the—the swirl of curiosity but it’ll only last a few seconds before it becomes pale, dissolving away. Like sugar on your tongue. It’s a tough pill to swallow. Literally,” Lance says the last part with a humorless snort. Then his voice goes soft. “I miss feeling.”

“You miss  _ feeling?  _ Like, as in, emotions? Because you looked pretty sad walking in here,” Keith clarifies, remembering how completely fucking distraught the boy had looked, the way his eyes had carried enough emotion to cause Keith’s chest to ache like it had been punched. 

‘Pretty sad.’ Understatement of the century.

“Oh,” Lance says, and he looks like he wants to leave, like he’s said far too much and he just wants to curl into himself like a hermit crab into its shell. “Right, that,” he says, raking his fingers through his hair for the umpteenth time. “Well that’s… sort of the shittiest part. I  _ can  _ feel  _ some  _ things, primarily uhh… I guess—I guess I’d call it hopelessness?”

“Hopelessness,” Keith repeats. Lance nods, swallowing the growing lump in his throat. 

“I thought that—because the dream was so realistic—I just—it was my fault,” Lance says with a defeated sigh after stumbling over his words desperately. “It was my fault that you died, and I just felt so  _ upset  _ with myself, that there was literally  _ nothing  _ I could do to bring you back, and I—” Lance cuts himself off with a shuddering sigh that quickly morphs into a broken sob. Keith stiffens, his hands moving to wrap around Lance’s shoulders once again but the taller boy pushes him away weakly, turning his head towards the wall. 

“No, no, don’t. I don’t deserve it.” Keith’s heart clenches and before he realizes what he’s doing, his hands are pushing against Lance’s broad chest and he’s pinning Lance against the bed. He allows himself only a moment of embarrassment before making his gaze icy and determined.

“Lance,” Keith says calmly but firmly as the boy beneath him gazes up, watery blue eyes swimming with confusion. His mouth is parted slightly, and Keith hopes he doesn’t notice the way his eyes flick down towards it before returning to Lance’s eyes. “You’re probably not going to believe me when I say this, but you deserve the world.”

Fresh tears spring to Lance’s eyes, and he tries to shake his head but Keith continues talking, refusing to be interrupted. “You’re kind, funny, selfless, and jubilant to be around. You bring everyone’s frowns to smiles whenever you walk into the room, and while everyone pretends to be annoyed by your stupid jokes, we’re all beyond grateful that you’re always there to cheer us up. You’re the light to our team and we wouldn’t be able to function a fraction as well as we do now without you. You deserve so much better than what this life has given you, and we love you, Lance. Shiro loves you, Allura loves you, Coran and Pidge and Hunk love you,” Keith swallows, but his next words still come out hoarse, the honesty choking him, “I love you. So don’t ever say you don’t deserve comfort. Okay?”

“Okay,” Lance whispers as tears roll from the corners of his eyes. Keith sighs and drops his arms from either side of Lance’s face, rolling to lay beside him on the bed. 

“We’ll ask Coran about your antidepressants in the morning and see if he can’t figure out some solution. I’m sure there’s  _ something  _ we can get for you to take, it’s just resetting an imbalance of chemicals in your brain, right?” Keith says, suddenly very tired as he lies beside Lance’s warmth. He feels the taller boy nod. “Alright, sounds good. For now, get some sleep. You need it.” 

Lance tries to protest, but Keith claps a hand over his mouth. 

“Shh, I’ll be here if you get another nightmare. But you seriously need some sleep, dude.” Lance lifts Keith’s hand from over his mouth and looks to Keith in alarm.

“Wait, you mean I can sleep here?” he asks incredulously. Keith’s eyes are already closed, but he makes an affirmative noise before snuggling deeper into the mattress.

“Yeah, I’d like that. Please stay.” He says, sleep fogging his speech. Lance stares dumbstruck at his soft, sleepy face for a moment, before he feels his cheeks warm and a smile creep onto his lips.

“Well, when you ask so nicely,” he responds, and Keith smirks as he drifts into unconsciousness, the last thing he hears is Lance’s nearly inaudible “I love you too,” before his brain shuts off and sleep overtakes him. 

Maybe it’s because he’s already had a nightmare worthy of an oscar in its pure terrifying detail, maybe it’s because it’s late and his brain doesn’t have time to conjure anything new, maybe it’s because of the warm body wrapped in his arms.

Regardless of the reason, for the first time in weeks, Lance’s sleep is uninterrupted. 

**Author's Note:**

> Like what I do? Want to support my work? Just wanna be a cool person and help a brotha out? Buy me a coffee!!  
> https://ko-fi.com/wecara <3


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